By Nigel Parry, Downtown St. Paul Voice—When Lisa Mathieson moved to Lowertown a dozen years ago, she quickly became involved in the arts community and has since made her presence known. She has served as a community arts organizer and St. Paul Art Crawl liaison for the Tilsner Artists’ Cooperative, a board member of the St. Paul Art Collective, and co-organizer of the Lowertown Drawing Circle, now approaching the end of its first decade of weekly Sunday meetings. What is most remarkable is that she has done all this while battling a debilitating disease.

Raised in Fergus Falls, Minn., Mathieson’s introduction to the arts world came through classical music training. However, she discovered her artistic passion when she traded her horn for paintbrushes while attending Bethel University, where she graduated with a bachelor in fine arts in 1988, majoring in studio arts with minors in art history, philosophy and English literature. She credits the rigorous practice and performance regime required of musicians with “fine tuning and tempering” her into the artist she is today.

After college, Mathieson studied photographic lighting and darkroom techniques at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and also took an eclectic mix of graduate courses in poetry, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, astronomy and ornithology at a variety of local colleges, including the University of Minnesota, Hamline University and Augsburg College. She also studied and worked extensively at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis.

“In those years after college I discovered porcelain, realizing the first time I handled it that it was an extraordinary medium with complexity and depth. I felt my hands were made for it,” she said. “I found glass a few years after that, and today I throw and hand-build clay. In glass, I fuse, cast, cold-work and slump (using gravity in a kiln to mold glass) the materials.” 

Working with glass requires much skill and patience.

“A pendent might have eight to 10 layers of glass in it,” she explained. “It may have spent 54 hours heating, and another 60 hours annealing (the process of molten metal or glass cooling slowly). That’s almost five days total in the kiln. Then it’s cut on a tile saw with a diamond blade, ground into shape on a diamond grinder, and polished.

“There is always the challenge when working with mediums like glass and porcelain for the artist to rise above the perceived preciousness inherent in the material,” she added. “Porcelain is particularly conducive to this challenge due to its raw bone-like frailty. When thrown on the wheel, it can be worked until it’s quite thin. It can be made strong, however, through compression, in much the same way that glass can be made strong through annealing.”

Strength through compression

Mathieson learned about strength through compression from more than working with clay and glass. At age 19, she developed a debilitating autoimmune disease that severely affects her bones. She was subsequently told by doctors that she had six months to live, a prediction she has defied for 35 years and counting. However, the disease remains to be a metaphorical kiln in which she herself is daily subject to a different kind of fire.

One way she deals with her disability is by reflecting her own physical frailty in her ceramic and glass sculptures, which often have recognizable bone and spine motifs that emphasize the fragility already hinted at by the medium itself.

“Much of my work speaks to brokenness, both literally and metaphorically, and making art that articulates brokenness is a two-way journey—from the fractures inside to the fractures in the world around us and back again,” she said. “Artists have been speaking to the brokenness of our persons, tribes and cultures since time immemorial. I believe in the possibility of personal and societal wholeness and perhaps even redemption through the making of art. I hope that people see a bit of themselves in my art.” 

Those close to Mathieson know her to be unfailingly upbeat regardless of whatever pain she is navigating on any given day. This is reflected in her drawings, which are cheerful and bright. Using a tropical color palette, she creates playful, pseudo-realistic wildlife set against fantastical forest flora. She recently created an exploratory coloring book project, which proved popular and prompted plans for a follow-up book featuring line drawings of Minnesota-centric motifs.

A love of Lowertown

Mathieson’s studio on the 5th floor of the six-story Tilsner Artists’ Cooperative overlooks an awe-inspiring panorama of the Mississippi River to the south and Indian Mounds Park to the east. While this space alone would attract nearly any artist to the neighborhood, she wastes no time equivocating what keeps her here: “The art, the art, the art… the artists, the artists, the artists!” she said. “Lowertown is a small town where everybody knows you and you know everybody.”

Mathieson cites the arrival of the St. Paul Saints as the beginning of the neighborhood’s most profound period of change in several decades. While recognizing the massive migration of artists out of Lowertown to Northeast Minneapolis and other St. Paul neighborhoods—some estimate the loss at between 33-50%— Mathieson ascribes to a ‘what’s done is done’ philosophy and is quick to point out that many artists remain.

“Joe Paquet is one of the most in-demand traditional plein aire landscape painters in the world,” she said, “and Ta-coumba Aiken, another local artist, also has an international reputation. There are so many artists and performers living in Lowertown that have had a global reach.”

Sitting in her studio surrounded by examples of her work, it’s evident she is passionate about her own art. She is constantly picking up a new piece of pottery or glass to explain the process by which that particularly exquisite, swirling, shimmering, multilayer, colored bowl, vase, pendant or sculpture came to be. Her enthusiasm is infectious and her space eclectic, with works spanning multiple mediums displayed on every shelf and surface.

Mathieson also collaborates with other artists and organizations. One example is her work with a local luthier. She was one of several local artists to customize a finished guitar for guitar maker Gene Kuschnir, covering the instrument with a glass mosaic. Another is the St. Paul Saints’ coloring pages project, which uses local artists three times a year to create designs for kids to color during baseball games.



Mathieson has shown her work extensively around the Twin Cities and across the state at numerous exhibits and art fairs and has won many awards and commendations. One was for a commemorative piece about her paternal grandmother entitled “Requiem” that was part of a spiritual-themed exhibit that traveled to several local churches before concluding at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. She was also awarded for her luminescent glass mask of King Boreas (“the King of Winds”) at a St. Paul Winter Carnival Art Show.

Passionate about sharing her skills, Mathieson teaches pottery and glass classes and offers private or group classes on request. Her jewelry, visual art and pottery are available in the gift shop of the AZ Gallery, 308 E. Prince St., and the Minnesota History Center gift shop periodically stocks her work. The Weekly Lowertown Drawing Circle takes place 1-3 p.m. every Sunday at Just/Us restaurant, 275 E. 4th St. All ages and abilities are welcome. Visit Mathieson April 24-26 at her studio in the Tilsner Building, 300 Broadway St., during the St. Paul Spring Art Crawl, or view her work at instagram.com/lisa.c.mathieson.